


Requiem

by historymiss



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 14:53:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17851679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: Dad has trained him to fight and kill and save the world. He hadn’t thought about what Five would need to bury his siblings.(At the end of the world, Number Five says goodbye to his family.)





	Requiem

On the third day, he buries them.

Five knows he should have done it sooner. He knows he should have done a lot of things. Spent more time with Vanya, been nicer to Pogo, maybe helped Luther with that dumbass model plane he’d been been obsessed with lately.

Maybe even listened to dad.

It doesn’t matter anymore now. What matters is that, even in the future, even at the end of the world, bodies decay. And Five finds that he doesn’t have it in him to let his brothers and sisters rot.

The first problem is logistical. Five is a trained assassin, but he’s still a fifteen year old boy and his siblings are ( _were_ , he reminds himself) adults. Adults buried under rubble, which has to be dug out by hand, the bodies dragged free inch by painstaking inch. Five stops crying after the second corpse. He stops apologising for the scrapes after the third.

Once they are laid out in a row, it is depressingly easy to tell which of his siblings resides in these adult strangers. Klaus’ goth scarecrow look is rather gauche for Five’s taste, but it fits the boy who was already beginning to chafe against that stupid shorts-and-knee-socks uniform that painted them as freaks far more effectively than the mask ever could. The track marks in his arms and the baggie that drops from his coat aren’t a surprise either. Five has had enough What To Do About Klaus talks with Vanya to recognise this potential future.

Diego, he is grimly amused to see, has become exactly the man he wanted to be at fifteen, right down to the scar that half-crowns his forehead. It’s actually kind of sad, but his knives are probably going to be useful and maybe Five disappearing will set him on a kinder path. Or at least one that involves less military surplus.

Even in death, Allison looks like she’s keeping a secret. Five remembers how she’d played with her powers, out in the field: the same way he had, revelling in what she could make happen with that one magic phrase. It had driven him wild, occasionally, that she was so very powerful and did nothing with it but tell lies. Five wonders if, somewhere in the past, she’ll use it to try and bring him home.

Luther has somehow maliciously conspired to become a giant in adulthood. He’s impossible to move, so Five lines the others up next to him instead. Out of all of them, Luther is the one that doubles him over, choking grief into the sleeve of his ruined blazer. As an adult, his face is set in the melancholy it was still learning when Five left. He looks kind, through the sadness. He looks like the sort of adult they’d needed, back then.

(He never finds Vanya, and in his exhausted state all that Five can think is that one less body to deal with is a blessing)

Number Five piles rubble over them all, covering the faces first so he doesn’t have to look at them any more. The whole filthy, excruciating business takes two days in total and when it’s done he feels hollow and much, much older. Dad has trained him to fight and kill and save the world. He hadn’t thought about what Five would need to bury his siblings.

“I’m sorry.” He says, to the four mounds of rubble that are left. Scuffs his sensible shoe on a stray stone. “You all looked like shit. I’ll try and warn you, when I get back.” Five pauses, looks at the darkening sky. Sighs. There’s nothing more he can say, not really, so he doesn’t. Instead, Five turns his back on his family and walks into the end of the world.

(Three decades later, Five will fall through a hole in space and time and look at these- these _kids_ , the future of his siblings finally animate in all their shabby, dysfunctional glory, and sigh. He’s too fucking late to save them yet again.)


End file.
